Even the lazy shouldn't use 'plagiarism software,' marketed as 'AI' | MARK HUGHES COBB

Rat shoes for sale; never worn.

How many of you would have to erase the mental "ick" if that had read "squirrel"?

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Squint again. Squirrels are rats with fluffy tails, just as cooing doves and pigeons are basically the same thing. Think of city pigeons as punk doves. Prince would approve.

Funny how adding a word or two, shifting a perspective, can help dislodge pebbles of thought that could lead to the landslide of revolution.

Please, friends, stop enabling mechanical plagiarism under the guide of "But it's fun!"

Using such tools — laughably called "AI," a marketing ploy for applications that have been around for years, if not decades, at least in nascent forms — is screwing your friends who are musicians, writers, visual artists ... anyone who creates. It's stealing from and not rewarding them, much like music-streaming services.

It's not intelligent. It's just software. There's been no singularity. Machines do not possess consciousness.

Marketing folks decided now was the time to trumpet "AI," because consumers weren't buying enough ... uh ... bull?

There's been an ongoing evolution in complexity, but software has not achieved sentience, nor is it — as Noam Chomsky is saying — anything like as elegant as a human brain. Unlikely it ever will be.

Chomsky wrote in the March 8 New York Times:

"The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.

"On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations ....

(Editor's note: Here's a hanger-on to the thought that if you want something done efficiently, give it to a lazy person. They're constantly dreaming ways to avoid work, carving Occam's Razor paths through necessary tasks).

Chomsky again: "Let's stop calling it 'artificial intelligence' then, and call it for what it is and what it makes, 'plagiarism software.' It doesn't create anything, but copies existing works, of existing artists, modifying them enough to escape copyright laws."

Remember when "virtual reality" was going to become so seductively flawless that folks would give up actual lives to exist solely in a software-born, perfected environment? And remember how when it dawned on even the brightest that replicating the myriad inputs and sensations, the vagaries and tiny moments of a real world was so far beyond possible (theoretically attainable many leaps from now, though by such time, I hope we'll have worked a bit more on saving the actual planet, and plane of existence), they wrapped video-game screens inside helmets and marketed that as "VR"? Same shill; different packaging.

Besides, as some — I hesitate to tag them as "lazy," until we redefine what that means: Your mind thinks it's meant for better-than-mundane tasks — point out, no one wants a machine to write, paint, or compose. But they surely would adore advanced machines that not only wash and dry laundry, but fold and sort it, repair worn places, and alert the person's preferred shopper when jeans fray beyond repair. Absolutely no one would object if machines could diagnose and repair the personal vehicle you probably wasted the salary of a year, or two, to purchase.

At the risk of triggering Skynet, no doubt reading this screed via futuro-backward-ho time machine microfiche, there's nothing wrong with assigning unloved tasks to machines. Assuming there are backups and oversight — and great honking red buttons marked OFF — I'm OK with the idea of self-driving cars. Though we should be thinking broader, into self-driving mass transit, making that efficient, clean and flexible. Aside from savings on infrastructure wear and tear, reduction of often devastating accidents caused by human error, and positive impacts on the environment, imagine how much stronger everyone's personal economy would be if they didn't have to work a year or two just to afford transportation.

Several years ago I tried an experiment: Living and getting around in Tuscaloosa without a car.

Turns out mass transit isn't terribly popular here. After taxis, walking, biking and the like — that week provided a dizzying assortment of blistering sun, smothering cold rain, and high winds; aka Alabama spring — the best choice was our city buses, which at the time were too few, traveling not nearly enough miles, and shutting down too early in the day.

On the plus side, they were clean, pleasant and short-ride comfortable; the staff were all fine folks.

Here's a promising tech adventure: The University of Alabama, with a grant from the Federal Transit Administration and the United States Department of Transportation, is developing advanced driver assistance systems for large transit buses, a $3 million project. After studies, real-world products will be tested in the Crimson Ride buses.

Some high-end cars — a year or two salary from a CEO — have such autonomous safety functions, but they aren't at present available for us peons: not economically feasible. Automakers sell more luxury cars than buses.

Because buses operate largely in pedestrian-heavy environments, advances require adaptation for frequent stopping-starting, detection of pedestrians, emergency braking, precision docking, and more. Such evolved buses could connect with infrastructure, adapting to delays, accidents, flooding and other challenges.

Can our born-to-drive culture adapt? I bet we'll get there faster than the random-word generators intended to test infinite monkey theorem, one of which has assembled a partial line from "Henry IV, Part Two," reading "RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d." That simulator has been running 21 years, or the same amount of time my summer Shakespeare company, the Rude Mechanicals, has been performing. My band the Infinite Monkey Typing Pool began more recently, and as yet, have yet to approach Will.

According to the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, that coincidence required "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years." Give or take a monkey minute.

Will's all right. Actual intelligence works.

Mark Hughes Cobb is the editor of Tusk. Reach him at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Even lazy folks are more productive than machines | MARK HUGHES COBB